Corps et âmes

The Bourse de Commerce is drawing some one hundred works from the Pinault Collection to present the exhibition "Corps et âmes", an exploration of the representation of the body in contemporary art. From Auguste Rodin to Duane Hanson, Georg Baselitz to Ana Mendieta, David Hammons to Marlene Dumas, and Arthur Jafa to Ali Cherri, approximately forty artists have used painting, sculpture, photography, video, and drawing to explore the connections between body and soul.

"Inspired by the consciousness and resistance struggles of the 1960s tied to the movements for civic and women’s rights and for peace, the artists featured in 'Corps et âmes' turn the body into a seismograph and special witness to a socially committed art that expresses the anger of our present world and the threats that continue to weigh on individual integrity. Photography, drawing, sculpture, and painting use the body to testify to their deep otherness and to render visible that which is imperceptible or buried. The works bear traces to the scars of history, taking the pulse and the imprint of individuals who have been invisibilised, often stripping the body bare to reveal more of the soul. They bring out the beauty, humanity, and energy of real and fictional beings who reclaim their rights and their place in history.

Also inspired by the likes of Edouard Manet’s revolutionary Olympia (1863), which exploded the academic theory of the female nude to create a political manifesto, these artists are liberating the representation of bodies from the shackles of art history. These bodies, in their infinite plasticity, are reified, sexualised, exposed, and exhibited, all the more so when it comes to the bodies of black women who suffer the pain of colonial history. Between the violence of representation, sexism, and the affirmation of a liberated body, the works perform a choreography in which immobility and passivity give way to an activation of rediscovered vital energies. Representation of the body becomes polyphonic, revealing both the fragility and the dynamic pulsations of a body that is reclaiming its relationship to the other and the world, as shown in the photographs of Deana Lawson, which are being exhibited here for the first time ever in France.

At times the works exceed the materiality of the body to take on a phantasmagorical quality in which the body becomes an envelope of flesh and bone, the incarnation of the soul. Such works evoke the primordial archetypes of mythology and ritual. At times they are imbued with the dreaminess and awareness of the dissipation of the existence of paradises lost in the works of Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch. Painting takes on a more symbolic and spiritual dimension, without ceding anything to political commentary. Incandescent bodies metamorphose, dance upside down, merge with the earth, and sail towards nothingness. Errant souls perform sacred, ephemeral dances, testifying to the ways in which history uproots and tears things apart. Art is an antidote to the fragility and disappearance of the body.

Three films by Arthur Jafa that belong to the Pinault Collection are being screened for the first time ever in Paris: Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), the beating heart of the exhibition, is being shown in the Rotunda, which has become something akin to an agora in which the voices of the anonymous and of historical figures make themselves heard. Echoing this musicality, the artist is also taking over the museum’s Gallery 2 and Studio with enveloping works featured in an immersive, intimate setting that invite viewers to become one with them.

The Passage of the Bourse de Commerce is hosting the works of Ali Cherri, a Lebanese artist living in France. His youth was marked by the civil war in Lebanon, especially by the plundering, theft, and trafficking of artworks that wars provoke. In taking over the twenty-four display cases, the consummate museum device for exhibiting objects, his work is also inspired by film and its twenty-four images per second. His sculptures have been conceived as ghostly flashes occupying a liminal space between life and death and between past and present, and which ask us to reflect on the age-old manipulations of cultural artifacts".

Chief Curator: Emma Lavigne Chief Curator, Director in charge of the Collection

Ali Cherri Curator: Jean-Marie Gallais, Curator, Pinault Collection

Arthur Jafa/Deana Lawson Curator: Matthieu Humery, Advisor of Photography